Since the link is to the editorial and not to the bill in question, I can't really say if it's really to okay bullying LGBT's or if it's to clarify that merely saying, "I believe homosexual practices to be wrong," is not necessarily bullying. If it's the former, of course it's stupid and wrong. But it seems more like the latter, and that just shows people lack common sense.

Being able to say, "I believe this is wrong," is not the same as a license to bully. And a law against bullying won't limit anyone's right to say that. At most, it will remind people that freedom of expression comes with the responsibly to use that freedom in a decent, civil manner.

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

I posted that link simply because in italics it has the wording of the bill in quote, rather than others I've seen that don't supply that information. I would agree in part that it is a persons right to say that if a person could say something in a non-hateful way like: "I believe homosexual practices to be wrong" rather than a more hateful one like "I believe you'll all burn in hell and you deserve it" (that being a tame one).

That said, I don't think the anti-bullying law would be raised in the cases of people being more mature vrs hateful though it does have the potential to be abused for sure. I mean, I support the right for atheists to say that they think that people who believe in God are grasping for straws...I think the core here is that they need to be respectful civil, as you've said. I may believe in God, but that doesn't mean others have to.

I think there is a lot more potential for a modified law to be used to allow non-civil unkind bullying regardless of it being about sexuality or religion or race than a anti-bullying law being used to suppress decent conversation. One has to admit that there's been precedents set very strongly that shows there is a lot of bullying going on.

And I guess you can look at the point from the perspective that people who are racist have to be civil about it too or they can face legal issues. I'm not sure if this is suppressing their 'philosophical' views. That's a pretty big umbrella term there. What does that mean? Do they have a right to speak out to others different from them?

Furthermore I went and got the dictionary quote of 'bullying'. It reads:

transitive verb

1: to treat abusively

2: to affect by means of force or coercion

intransitive verb

: to use browbeating language or behavior

I think that in my mind having a philosophical conversation "It is my religious belief that you should abstain from same-sex relationships." is different from bullying. I don't think that's what it aims to suppress. I think it aims to suppress the deeply damaging hateful things. And that's not a bad thing.

True to all that, but too many on both sides don't know that. Some people simply don't know the difference between a civil disagreement and bullying, and will feel persecuted and oppressed whenever someone expresses a view that's different from their own. And some people worry that they won't be allowed to express themselves even in a civil, respectful manner without being accused of bullying. I've seen plenty of examples of both.

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

Yeah. I think a lot of it on the GLTB side is that they don't get to choose this. I can totally empathise with how having to deal with this day in day out is that they are constantly having to keep on edge. It's like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs because you never know when someone's going to rip at the foundations of who you are. That's a tough way to live.

Then there is the thing that I don't think that anyone needs to come up and just tell someone they don't agree with them, civil or not. I mean, if it comes up in a relevant conversation, I can get it more, but I don't think that it is necessary to approach someone with the purpose of telling them such a thing. It's not like they can change who they are any more than they can change how tall they grew. It's just going to make them mad or frusterated or sad or a combination there of. I don't get the purpose of causing that.

Neither do I, but then again, when it has come up in a relevant conversation, I have seen people pop off and start calling each other "pervert" or "hate-filled homophobic bigot" for no good reason. And that's just it. Some people are biologically hard wired to be religious, too, and can't change that any more easily than they can change their sexual orientation. Ultimately, though, I don't see any reason for conflict there, but I do find it aggravating and a bad reflection on our society's collective intelligence when people feel there needs to be a law that says the following two things: Don't be a bully, and relax. Most people who disagree with you aren't bullies.

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

Angelique wrote:Neither do I, but then again, when it has come up in a relevant conversation, I have seen people pop off and start calling each other "pervert" or "hate-filled homophobic bigot" for no good reason.

There's no question that it's as easy to be a bigot when you're gay as it is to be when you're straight. That sort of talk is what the leaders of the gay community try to discourage, much as it's an understandable "fight or flight" reaction to being unfairly persecuted for years, often the most vulnerable years of one's life.

Angelique wrote:Some people are biologically hard wired to be religious, too, and can't change that any more easily than they can change their sexual orientation.

I sincerely question this. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I will say that all of my studies have enumerated religion among social constructs. If you have any citations for your statement, I'd be happy to review them and learn more.

Angelique wrote:I do find it aggravating and a bad reflection on our society's collective intelligence when people feel there needs to be a law that says the following two things: Don't be a bully, and relax. Most people who disagree with you aren't bullies.

[rquote=33712696&tid=15026&author=HoodedMan
I sincerely question this. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I will say that all of my studies have enumerated religion among social constructs. If you have any citations for your statement, I'd be happy to review them and learn more.[/quote]

Google "neurology of religion" or "neurology and religion." You'll find a wealth of articles there- not all in agreement, mind you, but I think there's sufficient evidence that while organized religion (just like anything else that is organized) is to some degree or another a social cosntruct, an individual's religious devotion or lack thereof is not a social construct, but a result of how their brains are wired.

But that's off topic anyway. More relevant is how it kills me when people say any kind of bullying is "understandable." It's one thing to understand how a person can stoop so low as to behave just as badly as their bullies- when they know better just how damaging such behavior can be. But it's another thing to call retaliatory bullying and responding to bigotry in kind understandable, which can lead some to infer that it's justifiable.

No. Being a bully just because you were bullied is even less acceptable in my eyes, because the bullied person who turns bully knows better than anyone else what kind of harm that can inflict if he or she thinks about it, but chooses to do it anyway. We all have to be better than that.

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

Well, I'm actually curious about this. So I will in fact attempt to do some research on my own, when next I have access to my academic databases and I'm not busy. Judging by the past few weeks, that will be sometime in 2030.

Edit: That's not a cop-out; I had just really hoped you had some sort of (optimally peer-reviewed) secondary source I could look at briefly. Research is not conducted via Google. (Well, Google Scholar maybe.)

I'm definitely going to do some actual digging myself, but I'm not expecting to find much.

Also, HM, snubbing the internet (specifically Google) is a research tool is sort of ballsy. Google may not bring you to all the sources and all the information in the world, but you can easily connect the dots and follow the paper trail (provided these articles & their writers do their research correctly and cite THEIR sources). I have yet to find anything in a classroom (which I pay exorbitant amounts of money to sit in) that I can't find on Wikipedia (for free). At least the important stuff. Often times the information is pretty much the same and when it's not, it's obvious. I'm talking "George W. Bush was known as the tyrant" that's obviously an opinion, and is easily overlooked.

If you're reading an article on Protein for example, it's sort of hard to screw that one up. But thankfully, there's a lot of source citing so you can catch up on it. If you're reading an article on (more or less pointless, not something you would ever actually research but probably just read up on while watching his show when bored some Saturday Night) pop-icon/comedian, Daniel Tosh you have to take every thing with a grain of salt. (Especially since he actually challenged his viewers to go onto wikipedia and create crazy misinformation about him and his show.)

*Phew* Okay, back on topic.

This last article I posted got me wishing I could post something different, more up-beat, so here it goes.

This is the sort of successful "Triangle Alliance"/ LGBTQI group that my school has been trying to organize for years now. We've been mostly unsuccessful but we've also had a lack of positive, organized leaders within the group. I'm very impressed to see somewhere out there there's a group that got it done. A good model.

HoodedMan wrote:Well, I'm actually curious about this. So I will in fact attempt to do some research on my own, when next I have access to my academic databases and I'm not busy. Judging by the past few weeks, that will be sometime in 2030.

Edit: That's not a cop-out; I had just really hoped you had some sort of (optimally peer-reviewed) secondary source I could look at briefly. Research is not conducted via Google. (Well, Google Scholar maybe.)

[Edited on 1/11/12 by HoodedMan]

Sorry. In a casual internet forum discussion, there's a difference between expecting reasonable backup for statements and expecting someone to defend a thesis in a subject for which they aren't even pursuing a doctorate. I don't consider the casual reading I'd done on a minor curiosity to be research, and I don't even remember every article I've read on the subject save for it was in the local newspaper, the Associated Press ran it, and I didn't get any of it off Wikipedia. At any rate, I didn't make any of it up or pull it out of my butt.

Do you remember every article on a mildly interesting subject you read, and can you link to it?

At any rate, don't pathologize religious devotion. The studies that have been conducted, if they were by reputable people at all, controlled for real mental illness. And anyway, it's no better in my opinion than ruling everything else people may not like, be it religion, homosexuality, or gender nonconformity, as a mental illness, rather than accept the reality that people can be perfectly healthy and just wired differently.

[Edited on 11/1/2012 by Angelique]

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

it's no better in my opinion than ruling out everything else people may not like, be it religion, homosexuality, or gender nonconformity, as a mental illness, rather than accept the reality that people can be perfectly healthy and just wired differently.

It just seems a little far fetched (IMO) to believe when someone blows themselves up in a suicide bomb they're not at least a little mentally disturbed.

Ult_Sm86 wrote:It just seems a little far fetched (IMO) to believe when someone blows themselves up in a suicide bomb they're not at least a little mentally disturbed.

Sure they are, but that has nothing to do with their religion. Take a basic course in Islam and you'll realize that.

I would also disagree that bullying someone and being religious and just bullying someone are in any way different. Bullying is bullying. It doesn't matter what the motivation is; I think that was the whole point in bringing up this Tennessee law.

And I have nothing more to say on the matter of people being "biologically hard wired" to be religious other than that it's always nature and nurture. Biological and environmental factors. Or so four years of study of psychology and sociology tell me. That applies to sexual orientation too.

That's really the only point on which I disagree with anyone above. I think we can all agree that bullying is bad, and there's no excuse for it whatsoever.

Edit: bullying -> just bullying

Edit: A couple more things. I do have to say, Angelique, that I think your reply to me was a little unnecessarily rude, but my reply had been ruder still, and I apologize for that. It just piques me whenever I say to someone "Huh, I don't know if that's true; can you back that up?" to get the response "Google it yourself." I would have been happy with a newspaper article or anything other than that.

And Bman, I'm just a ballsy guy. But really, I do appreciate the value of Google and Wikipedia. But I also appreciate their limitations, especially as a Wikipedia administrator. For something like this subject, if I wanted to find out what studies had been conducted, what their sample size and controls and results were... Google doesn't do that; Gale does.

Just one month after filming an "It Gets Better" video in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth, a California-based gay teen filmmaker has taken his own life. [. . .]

Borges spoke frankly of being tormented throughout his adolescence and young adulthood in his video. "I was physically, mentally, emotionally and verbally assaulted on a day-to-day basis for my perceived sexual orientation," he said. "My name was not Eric, but 'Faggot.'" He claims his mother performed an exorcism on him in an effort to cure her son of his homosexuality before eventually kicking him out of his home.

That breaks my heart too, and I really worry that this could ultimately hurt the "It Gets Better" campaign. How many people now have killed themselves after making such a video? It makes me wonder if some are making the video more to convince themselves to stick around? Whatever the reason, I feel that at least two people now have been failed- at the cost of their lives.

That's one of a number of reasons why I won't make such a video. Besides, such problems don't get better by themselves. We have to pull together and help each other to make it better.

Or at least shut up and just listen when our friends and family try to open up and sort things out.

At any rate, I should have specified that I had read some articles over the course of years indicating that there are some neurological components to religious belief, and that I googled "neurology of religion" hoping to find such articles without the time or the inclination to inflict upon others a posted list of links I would have found excessively long. I do feel strongly on these subjects. I can be quite frank and unladylike (in fact, I very much enjoy being unladylike which is a factor in some of the gender and perceived gender identity-related bullying I've received). I don't like feeling like I have to walk on eggshells. But I don't want to offend anyone. So there's that. Sorry.

Meddle not with the heartstrings of fans, for we are powerful and hold your pursestrings.

Yes, we all do need to pull together and stand up for these poor kids that are so lost and enduring such shameful behaviour that is launched against them. Part of the problem is that there is copious things in the media and elsewhere that help instill this sense of shame and helplessness and work to spur on the people that directly attack these individuals.

Like this dude. Who's a senator. Who's willing to do a hate crime, states he's willing and happy to do it and I see no actions against him (as in removing him from his position, not doing things like attacking him). It's hateful, it's shameful and it's accomplishing nothing positive. I have no understanding how this is tolerated.

Goodbye Letter of the Day: Five years ago, Redditor RegBarc was disowned by his father. He shared his story this week in a thread called “This is how hates sounds”:

In August of 2007, I finally built up the courage to tell my father I was gay. The moment I said it, the phone got quiet and he got off the phone after a few “Okay”s. I decided to give him time to process the news. About a week later, and not long before my birthday, I received the following letter:

“James: This is a difficult but necessary letter to write. I hope your telephone call was not to receive my blessing for the degrading of your lifestyle. I have fond memories of our times together, but that is all in the past. Don’t expect any further conversations With me. No communications at all. I will not come to visit, nor do I want you in my house. You’ve made your choice though Wrong it may be. God did not intend for this unnatural lifestyle. If you choose not to attend my funeral, my friends and family will understand. Have a good birthday and good life. No present exchanges will be accepted. Goodbye, Dad.”

… 5 years on and I am still doing fine, though this letter saunters into my mind every once in a while. When it does, I say without hesitation: F**k you, Dad.

For anyone on the board who may be secretly dealing with problems like this or even unrelated, and are contemplating doing terrible things to themselves... if you really don't feel comfortable talking to any of us (and reminder -- none of us are professionals, not that I'm aware of at least) I found this:

This just completely broke my heart. While most of the people who die as a result of bullying have suffered from crushed spirits, I suppose it would do some good to remind society that bullying sometimes kills kids by more direct means.